Ethan Van Sciver is a comic book publisher and YouTuber. Comicsgate was originally a decentralized reactionary movement of comic book fans. Simplistically the reaction was to the perceived imposition of contemporary political sentiment into corporate (Marvel, DC) comic books. Comicsgate in its current form is Van Sciver's trademark and banner for promoting his own and his affiliates crowdfunded comic books.
My curiosity was sparked when Van Sciver claimed to make $1,000,000 a year from sales on in a Tweet posted on October 18, 2024. At the beginning of February I conjectured that it might be possible to use the data there as a proxy for #Comicsgate consumer sentiment.
As I made some initial attempts to determine how that data could be captured, and shared my initial findings - Van Sciver Posted a tweet , which dramatically revised the estimated annual revenue for his EBAY store, to $398,000 for 2024 - which is impressive but a substantially smaller number than $1,000,000.
In the same thread Van Sciver went on to post a sales summary for January 2025
showing $12,202.07 in sales. This number seems reasonable based on revised data collection methods.
Revised Data Collection
I spent approximately an hour to set up with a spreadsheet with the listed inventory ~90 active unique offerings as of February 14, 2025. Checking the store for transitory auction items and updating the numbers of items sold per offering took approximately 20 minutes. Weekly maintenance of the spreadsheet should be substantially less than an hour - with a few minutes per day to check for inventory changes, and then one weekly tabulation to generate a report. Van Sciver's EBAY sales were minimal over the past 24 hours, but this is understandable as yesterday he launched a new crowdfunding campaign on Indieogoo: "CYBERFROG: DARK HARVEST. LAST CHANCE! 7 DAYS!". The campaign currently has 226 backers.
